A recent thread on the Morningstar discussion board on “Investing During Retirement” provides a good sense of what we’re up against in our effort to get the publishers of today’s retirement planning tools to correct the grave flaws in them that we have uncovered in recent years.
The thread was started by a poster who goes [...]

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So said “imfelbi” in a post to the Motley Fool board in the very earliest days of The Great Safe Withdrawal Rate Debate. One of our Numbers Guys had done a sensitivity study showing that the results of the conventional-methodology studies are highly unreliable. Imfelbi argued that: “I would rather work a few more years [...]

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That’s a phrase that appeared in a post to the Early Retirement Forum put up by a poster named “Mikey.” (He now uses the screen-name “HaHa”).
I thought that was a good way of pointing out how lame the arguments are that are used by defenders of retirement planning tools based on the findings of conventional-methodology [...]

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Here are ten angles that we might pursue in our efforts to get publicity for the “Save the Retirements!” initiative:
1) The Consumer Protection Angle: Think of what would happen to the chief executive officer of a company who made safety claims that he knew to be false for a trampoline or for a diving board. [...]

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I explained in yesterday’s blog entry that it has been four years since William Bernstein drew our attention to the grave flaws in most retirement planning tools. The tools have been proven dangerous to the aspiring retirees who make use of them. We need to get them fixed or taken off the market altogether.
How do [...]

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“Highly misleading.”
That’s the phrase that William Bernstein uses in his book The Four Pillars of Investing to describe analyses of the historical stock-return data that fail to take the effect of valuations into account.
The book was published in early 2002. It is now early 2006.
Go to a search engine, enter the term “retirement planning tools” [...]

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I ain’t no Numbers Guy.
It’s important that you know that about me because most of my views on investing have been influenced by what the Financial Freedom Community learned about what the historical stock-return data really says during its Great Safe Withdrawal Rate Debate of recent years. I lack numbers skills, and yet I rely [...]

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